The Best Carry-On Travel Backpacks

Opening up your favorite carry-on travel backpack—with all your stuff in the right place and easy to reach—should feel like opening the door to a well-organized closet or sitting down at a clean desk. This is a moment to center yourself, no matter how chaotic the journey. We spent six months testing 22 bags and flying across the country with all of our picks. In the end, we chose two as our top picks: the Cotopaxi Allpa 35L (for most trips) and the larger Peak Design Travel Backpack 45L. Both bags are exemplary carry-on travel backpacks that are designed for comfort, durability, and organization.

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The Best Bookshelf Speakers for Most Stereos

A great pair of bookshelf speakers is one of the best investments a music lover can make. It should last for years and deliver better performance than you can get from the majority of all-in-one Bluetooth and Wi-Fi speakers that are all the rage now. The Q Acoustics 3020i is our favorite pair of passive bookshelf speakers to mate with your favorite stereo receiver, while the excellent Edifier S1000MKII pair is a more complete option with built-in amplifiers and Bluetooth.

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The Best Dishwashers

Any dishwasher—even a cheap one—can clean your breakfast bowls and dinner plates, as long as you use a decent detergent. But the best dishwashers can handle the tough jobs and are also quiet, reliable, and easy to load. After digging through thousands of customer reviews and stress-testing 17 models with seriously crusty dishes, we’ve concluded that the Bosch 300 Series is the first one you should consider.

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The Best Waffle Maker

Fresh, fluffy waffles may seem like a delicacy reserved for restaurant brunches and hotel breakfasts, but a good waffle maker can give you the gift of superb, easy-to-make waffles at home. After 70 hours of research, talking with four experts, and testing 30 models since 2014, we recommend the Chef’sChoice WafflePro Classic Belgian 840B for most people. It consistently delivers perfect-looking, evenly colored waffles no matter what kind of batter you use. It’s also highly customizable, allowing you to choose between six different brownness settings and adjust for either a uniform texture or a crisp exterior and moist interior.

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The Best Wireless TV Headphones

If your household’s TV-viewing habits are out of sync—maybe late-night gamers are keeping early risers awake, or movies are disrupting work-from-home time—there is a solution that can bring some peace. Wireless TV headphones allow you to enjoy TV shows, movies, and video games without disturbing people around you. If you already own Bluetooth headphones, you may have an easier, better-sounding way to accomplish the same task. But if you’re looking for a complete package that includes headphones and a wireless transmitter, we recommend the Insignia NS-HAWHP2.

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The Top 10 Tools for Earthquake Preparedness

Earthquakes can strike without warning. So taking small steps now to prepare can help reduce injuries and make living in the immediate aftermath a bit easier (this applies to any natural disaster). Aside from learning the basics on what to do during the event—drop to the ground, cover your head, and hold on—here are 10 of the most essential items experts and earthquake survivors recommend having on hand.

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The Best Cutting Boards

A good cutting board is a workhorse in any kitchen. Above all, it should be large, providing ample space for carving or chopping, and relatively easy to care for. We recommend the OXO Good Grips Carving and Cutting Board for those who want a plastic board, and the Teakhaus Edge Grain Professional Carving Board with Juice Canal (15″ by 20″) for those who want a wooden one. Both boards feel good under a knife, and they stood up to many sharp cuts, dark stains, and strong odors better than the competition. Plus, after years of long-term testing, neither board has split or egregiously warped from misuse.

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The Best Budget Digital Piano for Beginners

A good digital piano offers the most practical way to learn how to play piano. Compared with an acoustic piano, a digital piano is less expensive, more compact, more portable, more affordable, and more versatile—and it never needs tuning. The best digital pianos feel and sound so much like the real thing that students will easily transition to an acoustic piano. Among budget models priced around $600 or less, the Roland FP-10 comes closest to the sound and touch of a real grand piano, which is why we recommend it as the ideal way to begin your (or your child’s) journey with music.

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Cheers to 7 Deals on Our Favorite Drinking Gear Under $50

Water or wine, coffee or tea—it doesn’t matter what you choose. Without the proper gear to prepare, sip from, warm, or chill your beverage of choice, no brunch, road trip, or dinner party will be complete. But you don’t have to spend a bundle to save on our favorite travel mugs, water bottles, and wine glasses—all of these deals are under $50, which makes it that much easier to see the glass half full.

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The Best Carry-On Luggage

It may be time to dust off old luggage or consider new replacements as you consider even newer destinations. We’ve tested 47 bags over the past nine years and are convinced that the Travelpro Platinum Elite is the best carry-on luggage for most travelers. It packs five days’ worth of clothes into standard US carry-on dimensions and has premium build-quality touches you’d expect from a $600 bag at about half the price. It’s a bag that you can rely on for life, even if it’s damaged by airlines—a rarity at any price.

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The Best VR Headset

Virtual reality can be an arresting way to step into engaging virtual worlds, even if it’s still a new technology that remains far from being a “most people” purchase. We think the Meta (formerly Oculus) Quest 2 is the best headset for most people because it’s the easiest to use and offers access to the widest range of games and experiences.

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Choosing the Right PlayStation 5

The PlayStation 4 era, which started in 2013, is over. Big PlayStation titles will still launch on the PS4 in 2023, but the PS4 is expected to cease production by the end of the year. In 2023, new-PlayStation shoppers have a better option: the $500 PlayStation 5 and its somewhat slimmer sibling, the $400 PlayStation 5 Digital Edition.

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The Best Soda Maker

For the avid bubble lover, nothing hits the spot like a crisp glass of seltzer. An at-home soda maker provides a potentially more economical and environmentally friendly alternative to store-bought seltzer. It also allows you to get creative with carbonated beverages and ensures that you are always just a button push away from getting bubbly. Of the 26 soda makers we’ve tested over the years, the Drinkmate OmniFizz stands out for its stellar seltzer, simple carbonation process, and ability to carbonate more than just water.

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How to Clean an Air Fryer

Air fryers are alluring because they can cut the chore of cooking in half; they create fewer dirty dishes while also cooking in less time. Though we’ve found that air fryers can be an excellent kitchen tool—they have a compact footprint, cook fast, and can be more accessible for people with certain disabilities—cleaning them is still a pesky process (as with any appliance). Cleaning an air fryer is no different than cleaning any other piece of cookware—maybe a little worse, depending on the design of the basket and if the heating elements get splattered with grease. To make cleaning as easy as possible, do it every time you use your air fryer.

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The Best Juicer

Only a dedicated juicer can make beverages that are as silky and flavorful as the pricey ones you buy from a café. After juicing more than 60 pounds of leafy greens, fibrous roots, and fruits over 30 hours, we think the Omega VSJ843 offers the best value. In our tests, this machine cranked out verdant, smooth green juice and earthy, spicy carrot-apple-ginger juice. The Omega is a steadfast favorite among juice enthusiasts, and it’s backed by the best warranty we’ve found.

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The Best Bluetooth Tracker

If you’re lucky, the $30 you spend on a Bluetooth tracker will be wasted money. These tags are helpful only when you need to find your stuff—if you never lose things, they’re just ornamental. But if you’re often scrambling to locate your keys or bag as you’re heading out the door, a Bluetooth tracker can be a lifesaver. iPhone users should choose Apple’s AirTag, which employs a huge network of Apple devices to passively search for lost goods and enable precision finding features, making it more likely that you’ll recover what you’ve misplaced. If you use an Android phone, go with Tile trackers, including the Tile Mate (2022). With the second-largest crowd-finding network, Tile is the best option for those who don’t use Apple’s phones.

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We Wish Buying Carbon Offsets for Your Flight Helped. It Doesn’t.

Flying from Hawaii, where I live, to just about anywhere in the world requires at least one 2,400-mile leg of cross-ocean air travel—that’s roughly the width of the continental US. Not an ideal situation for someone trying to minimize his climate-change impact while still seeing far-off friends and family once a year. Air travel produces up to 3% of global carbon dioxide emissions each year and 10% of transportation-related emissions in the US—and the problem’s not going away any time soon. Shorter flights have the potential to go electric; efforts take place in the margins where the complicated math of battery weight versus power output begin to make sense. But pound for combustible pound, nothing comes close to good old-fashioned jet fuel for keeping the big planes in the sky.

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The Best Baby Swaddles

Swaddling—wrapping a baby securely in a thin blanket—can help minimize the startle reflex, replicate the coziness of the womb, and calm a baby who’s overstimulated. To find the best swaddles, we had five families spend two weeks testing 11 of them with babies ranging in age from 2 to 12 weeks, and talked to four birth and postpartum experts. There’s no single swaddle that will work for every baby, and the right swaddle for one baby might even change between the newborn stage and later months. Still, we found that the Happiest Baby Sleepea is the most effective at keeping a baby securely wrapped, is among the easiest for parents to use, and is safe and comfortable for the baby.

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The Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra Has a Great Camera. You Don't Need It.

Flagship smartphones are extremely expensive, and one of the tactics that device makers like Samsung and Apple employ to try to convince people to upgrade is to add new, DSLR-style camera features to their phones. Samsung’s new Galaxy S23 Ultra attempts to justify its sky-high $1,200 price tag in a few ways, including a 200-megapixel camera that seems especially impressive on paper. But if your current phone is only a few years old, shelling out that much money to get more megapixels simply isn’t necessary.

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How a Laundry Sorter Gave Me My Weekends Back

My Saturday mornings used to be a total drag, and it was all because of laundry.

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The Best Suitcases for Checking

As seductive as the idea of carry-on travel can be, life doesn’t always cooperate—sometimes you’re just going to need a bigger suitcase. After researching 26 pieces of checked luggage and testing five finalists, we can say that the Elite 25-Inch Expandable Spinner Suiter is the best suitcase for most travelers planning to check a bag. The spinner easily holds two weeks’ worth of clothes, looks and feels fantastic, and comes with a limited lifetime warranty against airline damage.

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The Best Power Outage Tools and Supplies

A power outage can be a minor inconvenience, a threat to health and safety, or anything in between. But unlike the natural disasters that often precede them, blackouts aren’t relegated to specific regions the way earthquakes, hurricanes, and tornados are—just about everybody can experience one, especially now that extreme and unpredictable weather is pushing the limits of electrical grids.

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The Best Bassinets and Bedside Sleepers

Few things are more important to new parents than their baby’s sleep.

For newborns to 6-month-olds, the best place for that sleep is in a safety-certified bassinet, crib, or play yard in their parents’ room, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). Of those options, a bassinet or a co-sleeper (a bassinet with a drop-down side, for positioning next to an adult bed) is often the most appealing choice, due to the compact, portable size and shallow sleep area (which makes it easy to lift out a just-awakened baby).

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The Best Presidents’ Day Sales 2023

Presidents’ Day has historically been associated with three things: long weekends, sales, and, well, presidents. As the first major sales event of the year, it was initially associated with white sales, during which retailers featured discounts on linens like sheets, duvet covers, and towels to signify starting a new year off fresh. Today, you can expect a host of hyped discounts on big-ticket items like large appliances, mattresses, laptops, apparel, and TVs. But with every retailer promising bargains worthy of Mount Rushmore, it’s important to separate the quality deals from the overinflated duds. The Wirecutter Deals team has spent the day researching sales to find you the discounts that are truly worth your time and money.

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Trouble Sleeping? Try a Foot Soak.

It started innocently enough: After I sat through a Zoom meeting clearly miserable with nasal congestion, my colleague, editor Gabriella Gershenson, kindly suggested I try soaking my feet in some hot water. “It may help you sleep better, too.” In a ’90s sitcom, that would be the line that echoes as I wavy-effect out of a flashback, into a current scene where I’m explaining how I came to love soaking my feet before bed.

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Secret Weapons for Restless Nights, According to Wirecutter’s Sleep Journalist

I sleep for a living. Or, more precisely, as one of Wirecutter’s resident sleep writers, I make a living trying to help people get a better night’s rest. I’ve tested everything from mattresses to meditation apps, and I know all about good sleep hygiene. But despite having all the best gear and routines, I still often find my mind racing at 4 o’clock in the morning, counting the minutes until my alarm goes off. At times like that, I need help to shut off my brain, calm my body down, and get the sleep I need.

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